On This Day in History

1944: MEDAL OF HONOR. During an attack on the Ploesti oil refineries, Lt Donald D. Pucket’s B-24 receives heavy and direct hits and crashes. For his courage and supreme sacrifice in attempting to save the […]

  1942: Flying a Lockheed Vega A-29 Hudson, Lt Harry J. Kane and crew of the 396th Bomb Squadron attack and sink a German submarine (U-701) off Cherry Point NC to make the first sure

  1989: President George H. W. Bush presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civi­lian award to Gen James H. Doolittle (retired) at the White House. Doolittle is the only person to have

1992: Operation PROVIDE PROMISE. The US European Command launches the operation to airlift relief supplies to Bosnia-Herzegovina on a regular basis.

    1943: Lt Charles Hall, 99th Fighter Squadron, becomes the first US African-American pilot to shoot down an Axis plane, a German Focke-Wulf 190 over Sicily.

1941: The Air Corps Ferrying Command (ACFC) sends its first air transport flights from Bolling Field to Scotland via Montreal and Newfoundland. Using modified B-24 Liberator bombers with seats in the bomb bay, the “Arnold

  1975: The USAF retires its last Douglas C-47B Skytrain (Gooney Bird) to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB. Douglas Aircraft delivered the first aircraft in 1941.

1955: The first Boeing B-52B Stratofortress, the first operational version of the B-52, (serial number 52-8711) enters operational service with SAC at Castle AFB and the 93rd Bomb Wing.

  1994: A 60th Airlift Wing C-5 from Travis AFB flies a 34-ton Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine to Chernobyl, Ukraine. There medical specialists use the machine to treat victims of the 1986 nuclear reactor

1996: Terrorists bomb Khobar Towers near King Abdul-Aziz AB, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Air Force personnel and injuring 300 others. It is the worst terrorist attack against American military personnel since the 1983 bombing of